Netanyahu And The End Of Zionism

Once you admit that there is, or even that there could be, a place called Palestine, inhabited by people called Palestinians, then it is all over. But then, as we shall see, it was all over anyway.

Netanyahu was elected by those opposed in principle to a Palestinian state, but now says that he will accept one if it is “demilitarised” (unable to defend itself) and recognises “an undivided Jerusalem” as the capital of Israel. Imagine what he would say if a Hamas politician, having been elected by those opposed in principle to a Zionist state, said that he would accept one if it were demilitarised and recognised an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.

As for the Jewish identity of Israel, what Jewish identity? Anyone is now classified as a Jew provided that they are not an Arab. Russians Christians, Russian Nazis, East Africans with their religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism” (or is it Mormonism?), absolutely anyone at all.

And then there are those who regard the godless Zionist State as wholly illegitimate, yet are perfectly happy to live on its largesse (so that they do nothing except study, a very far cry indeed from the integration of scholarship and more conventional labour by their very recent ancestors, an integration usually held up as a glory of Judaism) while not only refusing to serve in that State’s Defence Force, but even raising their hands against the teenage conscripts who do.

But when it was decided to give the Jews (or the secular Ashkenazim, anyway) a separate portion of what has been one of the most multiethnic places on earth since the Year Dot, then a potentially never-ending chain of events was set off. There is no love lost between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea, so each of them will want its own soon enough.

After all, drawing as they do on traditions mediated by, in, through and as ethnically different groups of Jews (so much for “all one people”), each of the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel already has its own school system and what have you, in addition to the exemption from military service and the lavish welfare spending on them. But they are not satisfied. Given the history, how can they be? If you can show that you are sufficiently (even if not terribly) different, then you get your own little statelet, however dangerously, unjustly or absurdly drawn or constituted.

What with the Ethiopian Jews, those listed above, and all the rest, this will never end.

Or, at least, it will never end until a line is drawn under Zionism, the population (and thus the character) of Israel and Palestine is declared to be exactly as it is, the Law of Return is duly repealed, and any wildly impractical Palestinian demand for a corresponding right of return is blown out of the water.

Nothing less will do.

And that really is the end of Zionism, as such, once and for all.